Why you should write and design by hand

Herbert Lui wrote an article titled Forget the computer — here’s why you should write and design by hand.

« “Drawing is a way for me to articulate things inside myself that I can’t otherwise grasp,” writes artist Robert Crumb in his book with Peter Poplaski. »

« This brings to mind a quote often attributed to Cecil Day Lewis, “We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.” »

« In his book, Orbiting the Giant Hairball, author Gordon MacKenzie likened the creative process to one of a cow making milk. We can see a cow making milk when it’s hooked up to the milking machine, and we know that cows eat grass. But the actual part where the milk is being created remains invisible. »

« J.K. Rowling used [a] piece of lined paper and blue pen to plot out how the fifth book in the series, Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix, would unfold. The most obvious fact is that it looks exactly like a spreadsheet… The magic isn’t in the layout… It’s in the annotations, the circles, the cross outs, and marginalia. I realize that there are digital equivalents to each of these tactics — suggestions, comments, highlights, and changing cell colors, but they simply don’t have the same effect. »

« In chapter 13 of Traditions of Writing Research, entitled, “Relationships between idea generation and transcription,” authors John R. Hayes and Virginia Berniger conduct a study in which they learned children could generate significantly more ideas by handwriting than by typing. »

« Similarly, authors Pam A. Mueller and Daniel M. Oppenheimer [studied] students making notes, either by laptop or by hand, and explored how it affected their memory recall. In their study published in Psychological Science, they write, “…even when allowed to review notes after a week’s delay, participants who had taken notes with laptops performed worse on tests of both factual content and conceptual understanding, relative to participants who had taken notes longhand.” »